--San Francisco, January 11
WE'VE got to go along with the young fellows, cause they're the ones that run the union now. Lots of us old stiffs would be glad to work for almost anything--to sign up under almost any kind of an agreement. But damn it all, it's the young pups what runs the I. L. A. around here. Look at 'em--young fellows of twenty-five or thereabouts--with lots o' fight and mighty well educated. Say, you'd be surprised at the number of college boys who are longshoring nowadays. They tell us to let them run the union and they'll get us better conditions than we ever had before."
What the grayheaded old stevedore told me on the San Francisco waterfront a few weeks ago was undoubtedly true. I've been down to the docks at Oakland and San Francisco and I've covered the waterfront at San Pedro and Terminal Island. The stevedores--and the sailors too--are young men. Not only are they young, but many of them are well educated. They are part of that generation whose potential professional careers as teachers, lawyers, doctors, chemists, or engineers were cut short by the depression. In their desperation to do something, to get a job no matter how lowly, many of these ambitious youngsters turned to the ships and the waterfront.
The shipping companies and the stevedoring concerns were glad to get young, ambitious fellows. College boys had been used successfully in the past to break strikes among the longshoremen and sailors; why couldn't the same thing be done again? So reasoned the bosses, as they tightened down on their men from 1930 to 1932. The immediate effect of this policy was undoubtedly profitable to the waterfront employers. The ex-football players looked upon their jobs as temporary. They had little in common with the semi-literate workers. In fact, there was plenty of bad blood between the two groups. The youngsters knew little--and cared less--about the unions.
But the depression didn't end. More and more college and high-school boys applied for jobs. The employers tightened the screws upon those who had work. Wages dropped. Hours lengthened. Speed-up was in the air.
Within the past two years most of these young men have come to the conclusion that unionization is a good thing. The early days of the NRA saw them pouring into the waterfront organizations. The program of the progressive and left-wing groups within the unions sounded much more sensible to them than did the windy orations of the old-time business agents and officials. So they turned to the left, gave the left wing numerical support, financial support, oral support Harry Bridges is merely the official spokesman for an enthusiastic army of young, literate, and vocal elements out to establish newer and higher standards for the workers an the waterfront than they have ever had before. California shipping interests are in a frenzy. They cannot understand what has happened. Almost overnight, so it seems, their ships are organized from bridge to forecastle. The Master-Mates' and Pilots' Union takes care of the officers. The radio men, so essential to modern shipping, are nearly 100 per cent organized. The crews belong to the International Seamen's Union. At the piers are to be found the men in the International Longshoremen's Association, as well as those who carry their cards in the Teamsters' Union. And these unions are developing an unusual degree of cooperation. Ships are tied up at a moment's notice by the unions when they find the owners are trying to break the rules laid down or the contracts entered into. The longshoremen refuse to load or unload ships whose cargo has once been handled by non-union labor or strikebreakers, or whose crew is non-union.
No stone is being left unturned by the anti-labor forces on the Pacific Coast to break the maritime unions. They have already established a huge war chest. During the fall and summer of 1935 they tried to precipitate a strike which they knew would wreck the unions. The good old ladies of San Francisco are being worked into a frenzy of hatred for the "reds on the waterfront who want to destroy our fair city." Harry Bridges is pictured as a sinister figure, incredibly vile.
Speeches made in Moscow last summer at the sessions of the Communist International by Sam Darcy and Earl Browder telling of the amount of Communist influence in the maritime unions and of the great labor struggles soon to develop were given front-page spreads by the California press and emphasized by long and violent editorials calling upon all good citizens to join in stamping out this Communist menace. Such tactics on the part of representatives of the Communist Party have played into the hands of the reactionaries, and have added to the many problems which the militant leadership of the Maritime Federation must face.
William J. Lewis, district president of the I. L. A., and A. A.H. Peterson, district organizer, are devoting all their time to fighting Bridges and his lieutenants. There is no question in my mind that they have been working hand in hand with the Waterfront Employers' Association. Between them they are prepared to rule or ruin the I. L. A.
At this point it may be of interest to report that the Waterfront Employers' Association boasts that it has four men in the San Francisco headquarters of the I. L. A. and another four in the sailors' union. Whether this be so or not, it is a fact that copies of all wires sent to either of these local organizations are delivered to the Waterfront Employers' Association. Time and again the association has announced to the press the contents of confidential union telegrams.
The "news" that the San Francisco papers publish about the waterfront situation is so colored that the Associated Press has had to establish its own service; and it checks carefully every story it gets from the Chronicle, the Examiner the Call-Bulletin, or the News. Waterfront "news," I am told, is at least 50 per cent fake. It is part of the build-up made use of by a hostile press to turn the rest of the population against the waterfront employees.
Meanwhile, a new "labor" paper has appeared on the streets of the Bay cities. It is called the California Federationist and is the personal property of one or more of the conservative labor leaders. The Federationist is as bitter as the daily press in its attacks upon the radicals in the water front unions. Rumor has it that the money for this paper was put up by none other than William Randolph Hearst At any rate, Allen T. Baum--who is not a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Newspaper Guild--is editing the sheet. Baum is the former labor editor of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner.
Some time ago a streamer headline across a page of the San Francisco Bulletin announced, "Vigilante Dead Line Nears!" A two-column boxed editorial on the front page let it be known that vigilante efforts would be resorted to unless peace could be established on the waterfront. "Peace," of course, meant a complete knuckling under by the unions.
